In his “Economic Scene” column in the New York Times, Leonard writes about the challenge of cutting health care costs while maintaining or improving quality:
At the heart of the health care debate is the question of whether it’s possible to cut medical costs without harming patients. What has happened here in Richmond helps to answer that question.
He concludes:
Yet we now have abundant evidence that it does not have to. That’s the lesson of Richmond. It’s also the lesson of those model hospital systems, like the Cleveland Clinic, that get excellent results with relatively low costs. More care is not always better care. Sometimes, in fact, it’s worse. Just consider the recent research showing that radiation from CT scans will eventually kill thousands of patients a year.
Changing our more-is-always-better health system will not be easy. It will require difficult, uncertain decisions. But the alternative to those decisions is the system we have now — one that features unacceptably spotty care, a Medicare program on the path to insolvency and insurance premiums high enough to eat up workers’ pay increases.
We can do better than that. It looks as if we are about to try.
Read the whole story here.
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